Here's what I think a political economy of swarm behavior and governance might need, in terms of a research roadmap: (1) Basic science on how swarms should be modeled as actors---should we think of them as strategic actors? Or purely objects of engineering and emergent behavior? (2) Procedural institutions: what kinds of decision-making hierarchies and processes lead collective behavior to follow the rules we want them to follow? (3) Communication institutions: what kinds of communication infrastructure encourage swarms to communicate in good ways that we can observe? This ties back to the question of whether they're strategic or not---if we give them places to communicate, will that lead them not to communicate secretly (if it's an engineering problem), or will they still want to hide (if there's a strategy problem). There are some important methodological challenges we'll need to address along the way: (1) How do we build swarm experiments that are "externally valid"? There are millions of ways to design little experiments on swarms. Which ones best capture realistic conditions? (2) How can we get enough statistical power, if bad swarm behavior is a low probability "black swan" style event? Would love to see many, many people working on this.